Learn Korean (eng) (grammar & voc)

"You" & basic conjugation (intro)

How to say “you”

You may have noticed that I still haven’t taught you the word “you” yet. I know this is weird, but the word ‘you’ is not said often in Korean. Korean people get around saying the word ‘you’ through a number of ways:

1) Most of the time, you use somebody’s (usually job) position when referring to
them or talking about them. For example,
boss (부장님),
principal (교장선생님),
vice principal (교감선생님),
Mr. Name (for a teacher) (Name 선생님),
customer (고객님),
guest (손님),
회장님/사장님 (president/CEO of a company).

2) It is common in Korean to refer to people you are close with as a family member.
오빠 means “older brother” (when you are a woman). But even if somebody is not your older brother, you can call him ‘오빠’ if you are close to him.

3) You can usually call any woman or man that looks very old “grandmother” and “grandfather” (할머니/할아버지). But other than that, you don’t really call somebody part of your family unless you are close with that person.

4) You can generally call any strange man or woman that you don’t know ‘아저씨’ (man) and ‘아주머니’ (woman).

5) In informal situations, you can use the word “너.” 는 and 를 can attach to “너” when “you” is the subject or object of a sentence, respectively. If 가 is added to 너, it changes to “네가.” In order to distinguish the pronunciation of “네가” and “내가” from each other (which, technically should be pronounced the same), “네가” is pronounced as “knee-ga.”

6) The word “당신” means “you.” You may use this word when talking to anybody, but Korean people rarely use it. Most people that say ‘당신’ are foreigners and only do so because they are so used to saying “you” in English.

Basic Conjugation: Past, Present, Future

As I have said in every lesson so far - every sentence that you have learned thus far has
not been conjugated. All the sentences you have learned so far would never actually be
used in Korean because they are not conjugated. I felt you needed to know basic sentence structure before you learned how to conjugate. The good news, however is that
conjugating in Korean is much easier than other languages (including English).

An important note before you begin:
This will show you how to conjugate past/present/future verbs in the most basic way. Although all of these conjugations are grammatically correct, they are rarely used in
conversation. This form is sometimes called “diary form” because it is usually used when
writing to yourself in a diary. It is also used when writing a test, book (not in dialogue),
research paper, newspaper article, magazine article, and other times when you are not
speaking/writing to a specific audience. It is also sometimes called the “plain form”. If you used this form in a sentence, you should use the informal "나," as this conjugation is seen as informal. As such, in this lesson, you will see the word "나" used for "I" throughout this lesson.
However, as I mentioned, this conjugation form is also used in print (books, newspapers,
articles, etc...). When this is done, the sentence is neither formal or informal - as it is just
relaying facts. When used like this, no specific person is the speaker, and nobody is getting directly spoken to. Therefore, you don't generally see "저" or "나" in these forms of Korean, and there is no need to see these writings as formal or informal.
Though not important in conversation, this “plain form” conjugation is incredibly important if you want to understand more complex grammar later on or learn to read most printed forms of Korean (books, newspaper, etc…). You will learn the most important conjugations for conversation in the next, but I highly recommend you to understand the conjugations presented in this lesson first.
The only part of speech that gets conjugated in Korean is verbs and adjectives. As you already know, a sentence must end in either a verb or adjective.
Let’s look at how to conjugate verbs and adjectives in the past, present and future tenses next..